Today we will talk about the purpose of the Bible, and how we can renew our hearts daily with the Bible. The Bible is in fact the best business book ever as it teaches you how to manage time, form character, deal with difficulties and many other things. It was written for us to give us hope. As the scripture said, “For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4). The Bible is our guide book so that we can follow the people in the past as they have gone through all kinds of troubles and difficulties. That’s how we find hope when we go through our own difficulties. Sadly, there was a survey done that showed how illiterate people are about the Bible. We won’t be able to renew our hearts without knowing the Word of God in the Bible. We need to start renewing our hearts today and start reading our Bible daily because:

Every PROBLEM you will encounter will have already been encountered by someone in the Bible.

The Bible was written for you and me today. As Hebrew 11 said that the men and women in the Bible were like a cloud of witnesses surrounding us. They are not going to fight for you but they will cheer you on and bring you back to what you’ve learned in the Bible, so that you have hope when you are in your own fights. God works through you and He is not working in spite of you. We pray for each other not to fail, but it doesn’t mean that we are immune from our troubles. The men and women of God are helping us to build our faith so that we won’t fail. People misunderstand - thinking that God would fix or eliminate our problems. Instead, God wants us to fight our own fights and He builds our faith through the Bible since the men and women of God in the past already encountered similar problems. So when you are in times that you feel you need to give up, you can think of Jeremiah and see how he handled it. When you grumble and wonder what God is doing, you can think of the Israelites and Moses. When you feel that you are betrayed by friends, you can think of David. They have all gone through all those hard times before you. That’s why we need to read the Bible as the Bible is for us to:

1. Look for EXAMPLES to follow.

It was written, “Now these things happened to them as an example and were written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor. 10:11). We are at the end of ages when Satan comes to discourage us and distract us from God. Satan can bring destruction but distraction is way worse than destruction because one will lose hope when he is being distracted from God. Satan cannot steal you from God once you have accepted Christ. But he will do all kinds of things to distract you when you traverse though this world of frustration. And you will wonder what you should do when you are in despair. And that is the time we need to read the Bible and look for examples to follow, so that we know how to deal with the frustrations we have. Besides, The Bible is not only providing instructions that teach us how to walk in our lives, it is also for us to:

2. Look for LESSONS to learn.

Let’s take 1 Corinthians 10:10 as an example. It was written, “And don’t grumble as some of them did, and then were destroyed by the angel of death.” (1 Cor. 10:10). When you read this, you will find a lesson and learn that we shouldn’t complain, as it opens the door for Satan to destroy you. The Bible said that Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy. Satan cannot destroy us unless we open a door for him to do so. It’s like the old days when the Mongols could get through the Great Wall to attack China. The Mongols bribed the gate keepers to let them in so they could come and destroy. They wouldn’t be able to get in unless someone opened the gate for them. The scripture said, “Now these things happened as examples for us, so that we would not crave evil things as they also craved, and do not be idolaters…nor let us act immorally as some did and 23,000 fell in one day” (1 Cor. 6-8). Thus, it is our choice whether we want to follow the lessons and learn from it. There will be pain in learning but we will learn to discipline ourselves such that there is no regret at the end. But you have to choose for yourself either having pain with discipline, or having pain with regret. Which one do you want more? The Bible teaches us lessons and it’s like a map to guide our walk in life. If we don’t follow the map, we will end up at a dead end, or slipping off a cliff. While the scripture said that 23,000 fell in one day when people did not follow, I wonder how many are falling today when we don’t follow the Bible. In other words, the word of God is a rudder. It navigates us when we walk through different sorts of things in life. If we don’t follow His guidance, we will fall and not know what is right anymore. The Bible said that, “This is the way of an adulteress; she…says, ‘I have done no wrong’” (Prov. 30:20). It happens when people cannot distinguish what is right or wrong in God and:

·     They ADJUST their consciences to match their desires.

There was a married lady who got promoted to be the chief of a school. And because of that, people also found that she was using the school resources to exchange personal emails with a man, who wasn’t her husband, and those emails contained sexual context. So there was news about it. However, this lady didn’t feel sorry and wasn’t repentant. Instead, she complained that people intruded in her personal life and made it more news than it was worth. Meanwhile, she is an executive chief of a school. We are going to only reproduce what we are. Then what would the students learn from this? It’s parallel to the situation of how abortion became normal nowadays. It is accepted as normal when morality slips. Let’s remember that when morality slips, 23,000 fall in one day. We already have the Bible to tell us what was wrong in the past. When we look back to the time when God was about to do something great to the Israelites in Egypt, the pharaoh was concerned with the increase of their number and ordered to have all baby boys killed. With God’s grace, Moses slipped through the mass killing and God used him to deliver the Israelites. So we see that when God was about to do something great, there were children killed. When Herod felt threatened by the prophecy about Jesus, he gave the order to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under. This mass killing also happened when God was about to do something great. But it didn’t affect what God was about to do through Jesus, and we all can be delivered through Jesus nowadays. While we can all be delivered by Jesus by accepting Him, we still cannot deny that the killing of the children was wrong in the past. Nowadays, a lot of children are killed through abortion. I wonder if God is about to do something great again. A child dies through abortion every 24 seconds. One third of this generation has been wiped out already through abortion. Since the war in Iraq, 5,679,000 children have been killed through abortion. God has given us eternal principles that we should never change. When something in the past was wrong, you cannot deny it. We accepted Christ and we were delivered from our wrong past. We don’t endorse what was wrong in the past while being grateful for being delivered from it. However, if we don’t look for lessons to learn in the Bible, we will end up accepting wrong things to be normal nowadays. That’s how abortion became acceptable.

There is indeed a lot more in life than is mentioned in the Bible but all the answers are in the word of God. You won’t find them simply by gathering in an institutional church, but you will find them in the Bible which is full of the words of God. Modern society changes every 28 days. If we don’t renew our hearts daily with God’s words, we will lose our morality and get off tracked easily. The temptations we face every day are just the same as the temptation that Satan brought to Eve. Satan tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit and told her that she would gain wisdom and become like God. Such temptation was telling Eve that she could tell what is right or wrong without the need of following God once she had consumed the fruit. And this same temptation has been corrupting in our society. We often get tempted to decide what is right or wrong on our own without seeking God’s guidance, and justify our decision based on our desires without following God. And let me remind you again that when morality slips, when we don’t follow God, 23,000 will fall in one day. We cannot live without the Bible every day as it gives us examples to follow and lessons to learn. God breathes wisdom to us when we read His words. In addition, when you read the Bible, you do not only look for lessons to learn, but also:

3. Look for ETERNAL LIFE through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We cannot only focus on the present; we must also focus on eternal life. Satan has been discounting the value of the Bible to make you toss it out of your life. If you disregard the Bible, eternal life will become unavailable. Our current education can be dangerous to our faith because it is teaching us not to believe in the Bible. It tells you that you will miss out if you don’t get conformed to the world. However, scripture said, “Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may prove what the will of God is…” (Rom. 12:2). You shouldn’t be embarrassed for being a Christian. In fact, you should let people know that you are a Christian early on. Scholars might think that they are experts and know it all, and claim that the Bible is not scientific. However, they overlook the fact that God is an even bigger expert as He created all. Education can create a dangerous arrogance. Solomon was a very wise man in the past and he studied so many things and was the wisest one. But even he admitted that there is no meaning in life when God is not put in the picture. It was written, “I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom all that has been done under heaven. It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with” (Eccles. 1:13) Solomon figured out that nothing makes sense without God. If you study cellular biology, you will learn all the details of a cell structure and how a cell works, but you won’t be able to tell how a cell came into existence. You cannot make a cell out of nothing. Yet, the scholars still deny God and His creation. 70% of students in America believe in the theories of evolution. But there are a lot of unexplained miracles in the study of evolution and the scholars couldn’t explain them. Nevertheless, they would rather believe that all those miracles were from an explosion and discount God’s existence. There are a lot of miracles in our biological design and we can never explain them if we don’t have God in the picture. When things cannot be explained, the scholars and scientists will call it a “punctuated equilibrium”. It is like when you try to balance your check book and you are $1.80 off, you would just put $1.80 in out of nowhere to make it balance. That’s how a punctuated equilibrium is. And that’s what happened in science too. Science doesn’t explain everything when God is being discounted.

Lastly, scientists would say it’s a myth that God created the world in six days. It’s indeed not a myth. The problem is that humans try to measure God with their human standards. The truth is that God will never fit in men’s measuring tape because God’s measurement is different from ours. It was written, “He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light” (Matt. 17:2). God’s essence is like light. The Bible said that there is no darkness in God. So in my opinion, if God is light, God must also travel as fast as light does. Light travels 186,000 miles per second, 700 miles per hour. So when men take two days to travel around the globe once, God would have traveled around the globe 309 times in only one second. So when we equate this into days, one day of man’s time is already 27 million days for God. God’s speed is a lot faster than ours. Nothing can match up if we use our speed to measure God’s as God’s is different from ours. You might still wonder about the dinosaurs and a lot of other things. I am just looking forward to asking God about all those when I am in Heaven because we are going to have a lot of time there and I will have plenty of time to find out everything from God in Heaven. But you have to make sure you will get to Heaven first, otherwise you won’t be able to ask how He created everything else. You might wonder why God didn’t put everything in the Bible about everything else. If He did, the Bible would be tremendously huge. It was written, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). The Bible nowadays is small enough that we can carry it with our hands, as it was written that, “Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book, but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:30-31). The purpose of the Bible is for us to know enough that we believe in Jesus and be able to have a life in Him, so that we can live a life that is eternal and abundant in God. The purpose of the word of God is not to tell us everything like how the dinosaurs were created, but to give us examples to follow, lessons to learn, and eternal life to be gained. If you miss all these, you are basically missing life. And you will end up living without hope, not knowing what the next turn is. The word of God is very precious and I encourage you to read the word of God every day and have your hearts constantly renewed. The Bible has enough for you as a guide book for now on earth. When you get to the Heaven, you will get to sit in a theater to see how everything was created by God. But you have to make sure that you can get to Heaven first. Otherwise, everything you are doing under the sun without God is in vain. If you haven’t accepted Jesus yet, I invite you to accept Him today. You don’t have to be perfect to accept Jesus. All you need to do is to submit your heart to Him and accept Him into your life. When you believe by faith, you have eternal life in His name. It required you to take action to accept Jesus. It’s Him who can change your inside out. Transformation will only begin by receiving Jesus. Amen.

Discussion Questions:

1. What is the purpose of the Bible?

2. What happens if we don’t follow the word of God?

3. Why is the Bible “delimited” and not having details on everything?

4. How do we keep our hearts constantly renewed?

5. What kind of life do we gain from believing in Jesus and God’s words?